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Friday, January 10, 2014

The Geography of Hate

Dr. Monica Stephens, an assistant professor at Humboldt StateUniversity whose current work “surrounds geographies of gender,
hate, and censorship online,” has undertaken a project to identify the
geographic origins of online hate speech. The result is the Geography of Hate
map. Check it out, says a writer at the Fast Company website, “if you’ve
wondered where the truly hate-filled people in America live.” Well, not
exactly.

For the data used to construct the map, Stephens gathered every
“geocoded” tweet in the United States from June 2012 through April 2013 that
contained one or more “hate words” that she categorized as homophobic (“dyke,” “fag,” “homo,” “queer”),
racist (“chink,” “gook,” “nigger,” “wetback,” and “spick”), and disability (“cripple”).
Apparently she is saving hate words targeting whites (e.g., “cracker” and its variants), conservatives (“teabaggers”),
and black conservatives (“Uncle Toms”) and straight people (“breeders”) for a
future map, because they weren’t considered for this one.

The total from that time frame amounted to over 150,000
tweets. But because “computers are
poor judges of sarcasm,” Stephens says, “and Twitter is often used in sarcastic
ways, or used to quote somebody else,” three of her students first had to read
the entirety of each tweet to identify
only the ones in which the key words were used in a pejorative sense (they weren’t
interested in phrases, for example, celebrating “dykes on bikes #SFPride,” or
“nigga” as a very common term of endearment among blacks themselves).

The map ended up
showing where people tweeted those offending terms most often,
aggregated to the county level. Where there is a larger proportion of tweets
that include one of the aforementioned slurs, the region glows red on the map;
where the word was used less often (although still more than the national
average), the proportion is moderate and appears as pale blue. Areas without
shading indicate places that have a lower proportion of negative tweets compared
to the national average.

If you zoom in, you
can see, for example, that parts of Iowa, Virginia, and Indiana have the greatest
concentration of people tweeting the word “nigger,” and that there are higher
numbers of people tweeting “fag” in Minnesota and Kentucky. “As you’ll note
from the maps,” Stephens says, “racist and homophobic sentiment exists around
the country and not just in red states.”
[emphasis added] Notice her generalization (can we call it hate-filled?) about
the residents of red states, her casual “progressive” assumption that conservative
states would naturally be the national repositories of racism and bigotry. Hopefully
her research will begin to disabuse her of that, but I’m not optimistic.

Rather than
indicate “where the truly hate-filled people in America live,” the map more precisely shows where some
people, who may or may not be truly hate-filled (which is a very strong
accusation), merely tweet a specific
set of slurs. It excludes a range of people who may be much more hate-filled
but who don’t fit the project’s parameters. First, it obviously excludes anyone
who isn’t on Twitter. It also doesn’t consider people who may not use slurs but
are quietly plotting the next terrorist bombing. It certainly doesn’t include
people like the New Black Panthers, who are gearing up for a race war.

Furthermore, Stephens’ research unsurprisingly neglected to catch
vicious tweets directed at Christians, conservatives, straight people, law-abiding
gun owners, pro-lifers, Sarah Palin, her Down Syndrome son, Michele Bachmann,
her 23 foster children, Mitt Romney, his black adopted grandson, and other such
targets of a shocking degree of leftist online venom. Now THAT would make an
interesting map. But that will never happen in an academic setting.

Limiting the mapping of hate to a tallying of epithets
circulating on Twitter offers a ridiculously narrow perspective. The assumption
that slur words alone are an indication of where “hate” is localized is seriously
flawed, and such tweets themselves (though they are ugly and may be hurtful) are
largely impotent in the real world. The internet empowers countless posturing bullies
who talk tough online but are cowards outside of their parents’ basement. The greater
danger lies offline, from those who are more inclined to act physically upon
their hate.

As one might expect from an academic project, the map
doesn’t seem to serve much of a practical purpose beyond curbing free speech. How
about drawing up a map that catalogs actual
hate waged against actual victims? For
example, what about mapping the hate exhibited in the sick Knockout
Game, which is racist violence (let’s be honest about that, since neither
the mainstream media nor Eric Holder’s office will be)? That might be useful in
identifying where real hate resides,
the kind we need to eradicate.

But as long as we’re focusing on “hate speech,” what about
the hate emanating daily from the set of MSNBC, where its attack dogs like Melissa
Harris-Perry, Ed
Schultz, Martin
Bashir, and Dean
Obeidallah spew more venom than any red state hot spot? Their audience, embarrassingly
small though it may be in comparison to, say, that of Fox’s Megyn Kelly, is
much larger than that of any loser on Twitter, and has much greater impact.

The Geography of
Hate map may be an interesting intellectual exercise for academics, but its
narrow focus on ugly tweets renders it rather meaningless. Of course,
the very concept of “hate speech” is questionable and flawed anyway, because
who gets to define what constitutes “hate speech”? Why the left, naturally,
which is why the left never finds itself guilty of said hate. That’s why
Stephens’ research neglected to include conservative targets, a consideration
that very likely never even occurred to her.

About Me

Mark is the editor of TruthRevolt and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He writes about culture and politics for Acculturated, FrontPage Magazine, The Federalist, The New Criterion, and elsewhere. He has made television appearances on CNN, Glenn Beck and elsewhere, as well as many radio and public appearances.
Mark has worked on numerous films including co-writing the award-winning documentary “Jihad in America: The Grand Deception.”
He is currently adapting a book for the big screen and writing one of his own for Templeton Press.